Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
As a small country(air force wise) I'm not sure we NEED to be on the bleeding edge. What is the last honest assessment of when we could have our fleet of F-35's fully delivered, operational, and not grounded by software bugs and other issues?
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To me when you have a small airforce, you need bleeding edge planes that have a effective edge on the battlefield because every loss is huge and so is every successful kill or ground attack in support of troops.
The F-35's interoperability and ability to sucker punch the enemy to me is huge. If the F-35 does get functional it has a massive force multiplier that other planes don't have and technology wise would only be surpassed by 4 or 5 planes in the world, most of those that are still on the drawing board and not in production.
If for example and I'm not sure that its a great example you had a small army of 50 men facing a large army, wouldn't you want your 50 men to be equipt exceptionally well and have a higher survivability rate.
In other words I would want my army to be armed with high rate of fire super accurate machine guns and artillery when I'm going up against a large army armed with flintlock rifles.